The invention disclosed herein relates generally to performing storage operations in a computer network. More particularly, the present invention relates to performing simulated storage operations in a storage management system.
Storage management systems have evolved into complex entities with many components including hardware and software modules designed to perform a variety of different storage operations on electronic data. In some instances, users may wish to simulate storage operations to particular hardware. For example, a network engineer or sales person may wish to demonstrate capabilities of a storage management system without going to the trouble of installing and configuring one or more of the many pieces of hardware that are part of today's complex storage management systems. Many components of storage management systems may be software modules, which may easily be installed on a laptop or other computing device. Without attaching and configuring additional hardware components required by the system to perform storage operations, users cannot generally test or otherwise demonstrate the software modules that also make up a storage management system.
Thus, there is a need for performing simulated storage operations without the added requirement of utilizing storage media hardware.